Watchdog attacks US swoop for bank secrets

Europe's main privacy watchdog says rights of millions of people and businesses are being abused.
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Ian Traynor in Brussels
Friday February 2, 2007
The Guardian

Europe's main privacy watchdog yesterday said that the banking secrets and rights of millions of people and businesses were being abused on a massive scale by a clandestine programme giving US agencies access to the information. It accused the EU's banks and financial authorities of doing nothing to stop the breaches.

In a damning report on the covert transfer to US agencies of the details of millions of financial transactions by EU citizens, Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection supervisor, accused the European Central Bank of complicity in the system that has been used since 9/11 and which was deemed illegal by European data protection agencies two months ago.

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The Belgium-based company Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) has been supplying the US Treasury and the CIA with details - such as names, account numbers and sums involved - allegedly as part of George Bush's "war on terror".

After 9/11, Swift agreed to cooperate with the US Treasury by creating a system where personal data is transferred to a "black box" owned by the US authorities, enabling "massive transfers of data" and the "focused searching" of the information by US agencies.

The Brussels-based company says it is obliged to cooperate with the US authorities because it is subject to US subpoenas and could be fined for ignoring the requests. The system, which is estimated to include the bank details of more than 4m Britons, was operated secretly for years until it was disclosed last summer.

A Belgian investigation into the scheme found that Swift was operating in uncertain legal territory. Privacy watchdogs across Europe concluded in November that the company was breaching data protection laws and privacy rights.

Mr Hustinx said yesterday that the Swift operation "has breached the trust and private lives of many millions of people". He accused the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank of failing to demand a halt to the operation and of keeping quiet for years on the controversy.

The ECB denied responsibility and called instead for the European and US governments to "clarify" the dilemmas thrown up by a clash between privacy rights and combating terrorism.

In the European parliament, MEPs demanded new rules to bring an end to the mass abuse of people's privacy and data protection rights. Mr Hustinx also warned that the US snooping on European bank transfers could expose European companies to economic espionage and jeopardise commercial transactions.

"What is at stake here is nothing less than the protection of fundamental rights of our citizens," said Jean-Marie Cavada, the French MEP heading the parliament's civil liberties committee.

Questions are also being asked as to whether the Swift case is the only instance of private data being trawled by the US agencies or if telephone, email and insurance data is also being made available.

Iraq report pessimistic over US role

US has little control of events and further deterioration is likely, intelligence assessment to say.
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Mark Tran and agencies
Friday February 2, 2007
Guardian Unlimited


General George Casey, the outgoing US commander in Iraq, who is in line to be the new White House army chief of staff. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The US has little control of events in Iraq and there is a strong possibility of further deterioration, an intelligence assessment was expected to say today.

The long-awaited National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq expressed uncertainty about the capacity of Iraqi leaders to transcend sectarian interests and fight extremists, establish effective national institutions and end corruption.

A two-page version is to be made public today, after the 90-page classified NIE was presented to the US president, George Bush, yesterday.

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According to the Washington Post, the document emphasises that although al-Qaida actions remains a problem, they have been surpassed by sectarian violence as the primary source of conflict and the most immediate threat to US goals. Iran, which the administration has accused of supplying and directing insurgents, is mentioned but is not a focus.

The NIE has been a source of controversy in the past. In October 2002, the NIE concluded - wrongly as it turned out - that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons programme. The document provided the case of going to war in Iraq.

The intelligence assessment, which provides projections for the next 18 months, comes amid growing opposition to Mr Bush's Iraq policies from Congress, now under Democratic control after the November midterm elections.

The Senate is expected to debate a resolution next week, which was put forward by senior Democrats and Republicans who oppose Mr Bush's plan to send another 21,500 troops to Iraq. Although the resolution would not be binding, its passage would be an embarrassment for the White House.

Even among the US military, there is disagreement on the Mr Bush's troop "surge". The outgoing top US general in Iraq, George Casey, yesterday said Mr Bush has ordered more troops than needed to quell violence in Baghdad.

Gen Casey, who is in line to become the chief of staff of the army, said he had asked for two brigades - 7,000 troops - of additional forces rather than the five brigades that his successor, General David Petraeus, is now seeking.

"I did not want to bring one more American soldier into Iraq than was necessary to accomplish the mission," Gen Casey said.

He has said in the past that increasing the number of US troops would raise tension between Iraqis and American soldiers.

He added, however, that he understood how Gen Petraeus might want the full complement of 21,500 additional troops. They could "either reinforce success, maintain momentum or put more forces in a place where the plans are not working," he told a senate confirmation hearing yesterday.

The Iraqi government is also unenthusiastic about the US troop increase. At his November meeting with Mr Bush in Amman, Jordan, the prime minister Nuri al-Maliki, presented the Americans with an Iraqi security plan that involved increased deployment of Iraqi troops in Baghdad. But according to White House officials, the US found the Iraqi plan "deficient" and concluded that American troops were needed.

Gen Casey yesterday acknowledged that Mr Maliki was not enthusiastic about the American troop increase. "He leans toward not wanting to have to bring in more coalition forces."

Sen. Clinton: Iran Is a Threat to Israel

Anyone still think there is no Israel Lobby directing U.S. foreign policy? The frontrunner for the presidency in '08 seems to think so. Her father-in-law died yesterday and what is she doing? Some way to grieve, huh?
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Friday February 2, 2007 1:01 PM

By SAMANTHA GROSS

Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) - Calling Iran a danger to the U.S. and one of Israel's greatest threats, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that ``no option can be taken off the table'' when dealing with that nation.

``U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal: We cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons,'' Clinton told a crowd of Israel supporters. ``In dealing with this threat ... no option can be taken off the table.''

Clinton, D-N.Y., spoke at a Manhattan dinner held by the nation's largest pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Some 1,700 supporters applauded as she cited her efforts on behalf of the Jewish state and spoke scathingly of Iran's decision to hold a conference last month that questioned whether the Holocaust took place.

``To deny the Holocaust places Iran's leadership in company with the most despicable bigots and historical revisionists,'' Clinton said, criticizing what she called the Iranian administration's ``pro-terrorist, anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric.''

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called the Holocaust a ``myth'' and said Israel should be ``wiped off the map'' and its Jews returned to Europe.

Iran insists its nuclear program is designed to produce energy, not weapons. Ahmadinejad said Thursday that his government is determined to continue with its nuclear program, despite U.N. Security Council sanctions imposed over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment, a process that can produce fuel to generate electricity or for the fissile core of an atomic bomb.

Clinton, the front-runner for her party's presidential nomination, called for dialogue with foes of the United States, saying Iran ``uses its influence and its revenues in the region to support terrorist elements.''

``We need to use every tool at our disposal, including diplomatic and economic in addition to the threat and use of military force,'' she said.

Jimmy Carter’s Cry from the Heart

by Patrick Seale

Released: 27 Jan 2007

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The world rightly celebrates those Gentiles who, at the risk of their lives, saved Jews from extermination by the Nazis during the Second World War. In much the same way, Jimmy Carter deserves a monument for his brave efforts to save the Palestinians from Israel’s cruel and determined attempt to destroy them as a people.

In daring to criticise Israel in his new book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter has not risked death. But he has faced character assassination by Jewish groups, wounding attacks by fellow Democrats, such as Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, and vilification by former associates of his Carter Center at Atlanta, Georgia, which he set up to promote conflict resolution, monitor elections and keep alive the faltering Arab-Israeli peace process.

Carter’s fate demonstrates yet again the perils for a public figure in the United States to arouse the fury of the Jewish lobby and its many supporters. The use of the word apartheid in his book’s title, and its repeated use in the text, has outraged Israel’s most fervent supporters. But Jimmy Carter, the very archetype of an honest politician, believes in calling a spade a spade.

He bluntly describes "the policy now being followed" by the Israeli government as "[A] system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights."

President of the United States from 1977 to 1980, Jimmy Carter is a pious and practicing Christian. His passionate devotion to the cause of Middle East peace stems from his Christian faith. "Having studied Bible lessons since early childhood," he writes, "and taught them for twenty years, I was infatuated with the Holy Land." On an early visit to Israel before he became President, he describes how he "took a quick dip in the Jordan River near where I thought Jesus had been baptized by John the Baptist."

But Jimmy Carter’s devotion to the cause of justice for the Palestinians has another psychological source: his sense of having been double-crossed by Menachem Begin, Israel’s former prime minister.

Carter was the architect of the Camp David Accords of 1978 signed by Begin and by Egypt’s President Anwar al-Sadat, which laid the foundations for the Israel-Egypt peace treaty the following year.

But the Accords also prescribed "full autonomy" for the inhabitants of the occupied territories, withdrawal of Israeli military and civilian forces from the West Bank and Gaza, and the recognition of the Palestinian people as a separate political entity with a right to determine their own future, a major step towards a Palestinian state.

Carter thought he had a promise from Begin to freeze settlement construction during the talks on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza in which the Palestinians, as specified in the Accords, were to participate as equals. Instead, Begin "finessed or deliberately violated" his promise.

In a passage of sharp self-criticism, Carter writes: "Perhaps the most serious omission of the Camp David talks was the failure to clarify in writing Begin’s verbal promise concerning the settlement freeze."

Carter’s book is written in simple, guileless language, but burning anger at Israel’s behaviour is the underlying theme.

He describes how he forced Israel out of Lebanon after its 1978 invasion by threatening to notify Congress that U.S. weapons were being used illegally. When, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Israel invaded Lebanon again in 1982, Carter writes: "I was deeply troubled by this invasion, and I expressed my concern to some top Israeli leaders… Back came a disturbing reply: ‘We had a green light from Washington.'"

He lists dozens of Israeli crimes: from punitive demolitions of Palestinian homes, to mass arrests of Palestinians, the destruction of thousands of ancient olive trees, the frequent closure of Palestinian schools and universities leaving students on the streets or at home for long periods, the interception and confiscation by Israel of foreign aid from Arab countries, even funds sent by the American government for humanitarian purposes; and, above all, the accelerated seizure and settlement of Arab land. He has no hesitation in describing Israel’s ‘security wall’ built on Palestinian land on the West Bank, as an ‘"imprisonment wall." The Palestinian economy, he writes, has been "forced back into the pre-industrial age."

He relates how on March 29, 2002, one day after the 22 nations of the Arab League endorsed a Saudi plan offering Israel normal relations if it withdrew to its 1967 borders, "a massive Israeli military force surrounded and destroyed Yasir Arafat’s office compound in Ramallah, leaving only a few rooms intact… Except for one brief interlude, Arafat was to be permanently confined to this small space until the final days of his life."

There are, however, some cheerful moments in his narrative as when, on a visit to Arafat and his wife Suha in Gaza, their baby daughter, "dressed in a beautiful pink suit, came readily to sit on my lap." He describes his liking for Sadat: "Of almost a hundred heads of state with whom I met while president, he was my favourite and my closest personal friend" -- and his hours of often heated debate with the Syrian leader Hafiz al-Asad.

On the eve of the Palestinian elections of January 2006, won by Hamas, Carter met Hamas leaders and urged them to forgo violence. Among these leaders was Mahmoud al-Zahar, whose house was last week struck by rocket-propelled grenades fired by Fatah supporters -- only the latest episode in a suicidal intra-Palestinian war.

Carter’s message is stark: The only option that "can ultimately be acceptable as a basis for peace" is a "withdrawal by Israel to the 1967 border as specified in UN Resolution 242 and as promised in the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Agreement and prescribed in the Roadmap of the International Quartet."

If Carter were in the White House today, peace might have a chance. But he is not.


Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.

Copyright © 2007 Patrick Seale

SAN FRANCISCO mayor apologizes for sex scandal

Newsom apologizes for sex scandal

By Lisa Leff

SAN FRANCISCO — A city accustomed to seeing it all gaped, and then shrugged, Thursday after its dashing young mayor confessed to having an affair with a former secretary, who happened to be the wife of his campaign manager. Confronting a political scandal that carried overtones of a soap opera, Mayor Gavin Newsom made an emotional apology for what he termed a “personal lapse of judgment” during a City Hall news conference called only hours after reports of the interoffice dalliance surfaced. “I want to make it clear that everything you’ve heard and read is true and that I’m deeply sorry about that,” said Newsom, 39, who went on to apologize to the aide, his staff, his family and San Franciscans. Newsom’s former deputy chief of staff, Alex Tourk, 39, resigned as manager of the mayor’s re-election campaign Wednesday after confronting Newsom about his relationship with his wife, Ruby Rippey-Tourk, 34, who worked as the mayor’s appointments secretary until last spring. The brief relationship first reported Wednesday night on the San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site took place a year-and-a-half ago while the mayor was getting divorced from his wife, Fox News Channel host Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former prosecutor and lingerie model. Since his divorce became final last March, the dashing bachelor has half-heartedly lamented his appearances in gossip columns, where his active love life has been frequent fodder and included associations with a 20-year-old model and two actresses. But in his first public statements since the affair was reported, a poised but visibly shaken Newsom did not offer any excuses. “I hurt someone I care deeply about, Alex Tourk, and his friends and family, and that is something I have to live with and something that I am deeply sorry for,” he said. “I am accountable for what has occurred and have now begun the process of reconciling it.” Neither Tourk nor his wife returned phone calls and e-mails from The Associated Press seeking comment. Before the affair became public, the mayor’s office released a statement in which Tourk explained he was leaving his campaign job for personal reasons. He said it had been “an honor and a privilege to serve the Newsom campaigns and the city of San Francisco and its residents.” Since leaving the mayor’s office, Rippey-Tourk, a former KFTY-TV anchor in Santa Rosa, has hosted a weekly radio show for Benefit Magazine, which covers philanthropy in San Francisco. A description of her radio program on the publication’s Web site says she interviews the city’s charitable movers and shakers, “like Mayor Gavin Newsom, Sharon Stone, Robin Williams ... and others.” When he was elected in November 2003, Newsom, then 36, was considered a rising star of the Democratic Party and he received national attention within weeks of taking office after directing his staff to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. His spokesman, Peter Ragone, said Thursday’s revelation would not affect the mayor’s plans to seek a second four-year term in November. Political observers said the divorced mayor’s effusive mea culpa, which came only hours after the story broke on a newspaper’s Web site, may have helped defuse a scandal that threatened to haunt his re-election bid. For many, the scandal stirred memories of President Clinton’s affair with a young intern and his subsequent impeachment. But in contrast to Clinton, who famously denied “sexual relations with that woman,” Newsom quickly confessed and accepted responsibility. Newsom “did a good thing, he told the truth,” said Neel Lattimore, the one-time press secretary to Hillary Rodham Clinton when she was first lady. “By the mayor telling the truth immediately, it begins a healing process now, as opposed to leaving a wound open and continuing to fester.” A handful of San Francisco residents interviewed Thursday said the mayor’s transgression had little bearing on their opinion of him as mayor. “I could care less,” said Lee Simmons, 79, at a downtown bank. “Newsom is great. I voted for him last time and I’ll vote for him again.” More than one recalled the romantic escapades of former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who was long separated from but still married to his wife when he fathered a child with one of his fundraisers. Lynn Sywolski, 40, who works in commercial real estate, also was quick to forgive Newsom, whom she described as “pretty hot.” She said that San Franciscans should treat the gossip with the same laissez-faire attitude with which the French regarded the extramarital affairs of former president Francois Mitterrand. “I have to tell you honestly I don’t think it’s any of our business,” Sywolski said. “I think he’s done a great job, and I don’t think it is a reflection of his day-to-day job.” Tom Abbott, 36, an executive recruiter, said he would probably vote for Newsom come fall, but that having an affair with a loyal aide’s wife was “a total slime ball move.” “Any guy who puts that much mousse in his hair can’t be trusted,” Abbott said. “You don’t screw over your own boys.”

Stuck in Single Frames of a Terrorism Movie

by Rami G. Khouri

Released: 30 Jan 2007

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Boston -- The United States broadly as a whole -- citizens, government, media and academia -- has had a difficult time coming to grips with the terrorism phenomenon that struck its shores so traumatically on September 11, 2001. A two-week journey throughout the United States this month suggests that the pendulum is not shifting decisively towards better or worse analysis, but rather that American society in general is polarizing on this issue.

Some Americans have generated some first-class analysis on why various groups around the world use terrorism more frequently as a means of political expression, resistance or offensive warfare. Other quarters of American society -- especially popular media and politicians -- have slipped into panic and racism mode. They focus almost exclusively on terror committed by Arab-Islamist groups, and wildly tar all Islamist political groups as mortal threats that have stealthily penetrated American society, without differentiating between criminal terror, legitimate resistance and peaceful political action.

The worst news is in the public arena -- at airport and center-city bookshops, in the mass media, in conversations with officials and ordinary people. Here the prevalent image is of evil Islamic and Arab terrorists who work hard to undermine and destroy American and Western civilization, or “the civilized world,” (contrasted to the 'barbaric' Arab-Islamic realm).

The proliferation of books and television specials with this theme is particularly worrying. They build expansive, frightening scenarios on the basis of small facts or the deeds of a handful of individuals. Of course, there are individuals and some very small groups of Arabs and Muslims who speak evil of the United States, and a few of them have attacked American targets. Rather than being treated as the exceptions to the rule of rather passive, non-violent Arabs and Muslims, who make up the vast majorities of our societies, these handfuls of freaks and criminals are exaggerated into a global conspiracy that is a direct, immediate, mortal threat to the United States.

Such scare-tactics journalism and political nonsense allow otherwise reasonable people and rational institutions to dwell in a manufactured world of fear, ignorance, hysteria and racism. This is not new. The same ugly side of American culture did this in the early 20th Century, when the target of their ignorance and hatred was the Jews, who were portrayed as planning to control American society and then the world.

The good news in the United States is that more thoughtful individuals and institutions have started to generate some high quality, accurate research and analysis about terror groups. I was fortunate to absorb some of this at a two-day conference last week at the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University. Excellent papers were presented by a range of mostly American scholars and analysts, including Robert Pape, Peter Bergen, Fawaz Gerges, Steve Simon, Mia Bloom, Ian Lustick, Richard Shultz, John Esposito, Ayesha Jalal, Sumantra Bose, As’ad Abukhalil, Hisham Melhem, and others. I mention many of the authors simply to highlight the availability in the United States of so many good, honest scholars and journalists who grapple with this important issue.

The main conclusion of their presentations is precisely that there is no single theme or causal reason that explains the different kinds of terrorism that assorted groups employ all around the world. Nuanced, comprehensive and fact-based analyses of the individual, social and strategic motivations of terrorists provide a clear picture of a movie that is made up of many individual frames. Understanding the individual frames allows us to make sense of the entire movie.

Terrorists are variously motivated by many different issues that often mesh together in varying patterns across the world -- in sharp contrast to the simplistic, one-dimensional, quasi-racist gibberish about America-hating, hostile Islamic terrorists that dominates popular and political culture in the United States.

Some of the motivations of terror groups that emerged from the Tufts conference were: foreign military occupation of their homeland, domestic political repression and humiliation, revenge, religious interpretations, social prestige and status, alienation at home and in Western societies, aggressive foreign policies of Western powers, “civil war” within Islamic societies, charismatic leaders like Osama Bin Laden who mobilize their followers, assorted temporal political concerns that are perceived through the lens of religious obligations, issues of lack of dignity and hope for a better future, and weaving together national, historical and emotional narratives while appealing to domestic, regional and global audiences simultaneously.

The more honest debate about America's actions in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East seems now to be joined in places by a deeper, more analytical examination of why terrorism has expanded around the world. Let's hope the policy-makers in the United States, Russia, Israel, the Arab world, and Europe read and absorb some of this material, so that we can start to wind down the terror cycle that has only grown in recent years.


Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

Dangerous Weeks Ahead in the Middle East

by Patrick Seale

Released: 1 Feb 2007

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All the ingredients are coming together for a new war in the Middle East.

War-fever is being whipped up against Iran by an ignorant and bullying American President and by Israeli hawks shamelessly exploiting the paranoia which never lies far beneath the surface of Israeli opinion.

President George W. Bush appears to fear, or has been persuaded by his neo-conservative advisers, that Iran poses a serious challenge to American hegemony in the strategic Gulf region, while Israeli propagandists equate Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad with Hitler and portray his nuclear programme as an ‘existential’ threat to the Jewish state -- nothing less than a new holocaust in the making.

The message coming loud and clear from Washington and Tel Aviv is that Iranian ambitions must be stopped, whatever the cost. As American carrier strike forces converge on the Gulf, and as Israeli bombers practice long-range missions, several observers predict an attack on Iran in the early spring.

The outdated and dangerously mistaken security doctrine which underpins this war hysteria is that the United States and its Israeli ally must maintain their military supremacy in the region or risk imminent catastrophe. Those who preach reconciliation with local forces based on mutual recognition of legitimate interests, on good neighbourliness and an equitable balance of power are dismissed as appeasers and defeatists.

The United States and Israel seem determined to ignore the lessons of the wars they have waged, and lost, in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories -- that occupation breeds insurrection; that blatant aggression and injustice create terrorists; that an elusive guerrilla enemy is difficult to subdue; that states faced with the danger of war will seek deterrence; and, that the merger of nationalism and Islam can forge ferocious militancy. The locals, in sum, are not about to roll over and surrender.

Washington should perhaps reflect that China had no need for military bases in the Gulf to strike its recent historic $100bn deal with Iran to secure long-term supplies of oil and gas. Nor did Beijing rely on gunboat diplomacy to increase its bilateral trade with Saudi Arabia by 30 per cent between 2005 and 2006. (Financial Times of 30 January.)

There are, however, one or two positive signs in the surrounding gloom. Under Democratic leadership, the U.S. Congress appears to be awakening and may attempt to curb Bush’s belligerence by denying him funds for a deeper involvement in Iraq and may insist that he cannot wage war on Iran without explicit Congressional authority. In turn, the American public is at last rebelling against the disastrous Iraq war, as may be seen from last week’s massive anti-war demonstration in Washington.

More important still is the increasingly open discussion in the United States of the noxious influence of the Israel lobby on America’s foreign policy. In spite of scurrilous attacks by right-wing Jews, former President Jimmy Carter’s brave indictment of Israeli policies, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, is climbing up the best-seller lists.

Braving American and Israeli objections, the normally timid and divided European Union is calling for an urgent re-launch of the moribund Arab-Israeli peace process. European states are also showing great reluctance to follow America’s lead in boycotting Iranian banks, as demanded by Stuart Levey, U.S. treasury undersecretary for terrorism and intelligence financing.

Positive signs are also emerging from the region itself, suggesting a will by local powers to solve problems without foreign interference. King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia has indicated that he will not be dragooned by the United States into a confrontation with Iran. Instead, high-level Saudi and Iranian envoys -- Prince Bandar bin Sultan and Ali Larijani, the heads of their respective national security councils -- have held long talks in each other’s capitals.

Saudi diplomacy has been active on other fronts. The King has summoned rival Palestinian factions -- Fatah and Hamas -- to Mecca for talks, and there are rumours that the Kingdom is planning to invite Lebanon’s warring factions to a summit at Taif -- the venue in 1989, of the last attempt to reach an agreement on Lebanese power-sharing.

Defusing tensions between Sunnis and Shi‘is, inflamed by America’s war in Iraq, is high on the agenda of every regional leader. Hizbullah’s chief, Hasan Nasrallah, and Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Fuad Saniora, have both spoken of the need to resolve difference through dialogue not violence.

In the absence, however, of a radical change of policy by both the United States and Israel, regional powers need to look to their own defences by agreeing on clear goals. The following are some of these:

• The Gulf States should reject both American and Iranian hegemony, but strive instead to become an area of tolerance and modernity where Western and Iranian influence and interests can coexist.

• The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman) should conclude a security pact with Iran to dispel mutual fears. The Gulf States should pledge that they will not allow Iran to be attacked from their territory, while Iran should pledge that it will not seek to use local Shi‘i communities to destabilise the Gulf States or export its revolutionary Islamic ideology.

• A new balance needs to be found in Lebanon to reflect demographic and political realities. In particular, the state’s institutions and power-sharing arrangements need to be revised to give the Shi‘i community a greater, although not a dominant, stake in government decision-making.

• Syrian-Lebanese relations need to be put on a healthy basis. This involves Syria recognising Lebanon’s independence in return for Lebanon recognising that, in the absence of an Arab-Israeli peace, Syria has legitimate security interests in Lebanon and cannot tolerate its neighbour falling into the orbit of a hostile power.

• A Palestinian national unity government must be formed on the basis of a common programme which offers Israel recognition within its 1967 borders and an end to violence in return for a reciprocal Israeli commitment to end the occupation, renounce violence and recognise the Palestinians’ right to an independent state.

• The Arab states should mount a major diplomatic effort to win European and American support -- and the support of the Israeli public -- for the Saudi peace plan endorsed at the Beirut Summit of March 2002 which offered Israel normal relations with all 22 members of the Arab League once it withdraws to its 1967 borders. The U.S. can contribute to the plan’s success by offering Israel formal security guarantees.

• An international conference -- sponsored by the UN, the United States, the EU and Russia -- should be convened with the aim of bringing the Arab-Israeli conflict to an end once and for all, thereby removing the principal cause of hostility between the West and the world of Islam.

For peace to take root, a large fund of some $50bn would be needed, with contributions from all the major powers, to compensate and resettle Palestinian refugees in the future Palestinian state, and to finance the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

There remains the problem of Iran’s nuclear programme, which Israel and its supporters insist on seeing in apocalyptic terms, rather than as the natural reflex of a state, under international pressure, and under imminent danger of attack, to seek to acquire a deterrent capability.

It seems unlikely that bullying, sanctions and the threat of war will persuade Iran to suspend its nuclear activities. It is more likely to accelerate them.

Engagement, dialogue and recognition of Iran’s legitimate interests are the only sensible way forward, together with a commitment by the world’s nuclear powers to phase out their own weapons and work towards establishing a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.

At a time of grave danger, it is time for local states to take their own destinies in hand, free from the malign ambitions and military assaults of external powers.


Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.

Copyright © 2007 Patrick Seale